Reimagining the Great American Novel with an Asian American Cast

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What does it take for someone to work at a Chinese restaurant for decades? This is the question that catapulted Lillian Li into writing her debut novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant, a multigenerational family saga set in Rockville, Maryland, that reimagines the (somehow always white) Great American Novel with an Asian American cast.

Number One Chinese Restaurant

The novel opens with Jimmy Han trying to sell the Duck House, which his father left to him and his brother Johnny, in order to start a fancier restaurant across town on his own. He finds, however, that a fresh start isn’t so fresh when he tries to extricate from the complicated web of relationships with blood relatives and longtime Duck House employees. When tragedy strikes and unearths family secrets, each character must confront their own limits and decide what they are willing to sacrifice for the life they want.

Lillian Li and I met at the 2017 Kundiman retreat, she as a fiction fellow, and I as a poetry fellow. I was thrilled to speak with Li months later over Skype about the alienation of being a Chinese waiter working in a Chinese restaurant, writing the immigrant underdog who behaves badly, and hiding Easter eggs in her book.

Marci Cancio-Bello: What was your inspiration behind setting your novel in a Chinese restaurant?

Lillian Li: I happened to work in a Chinese restaurant the summer before grad school. However, I didn’t ever think that I was going to write a novel set there. Even when I quit, I wasn’t thinking of how to write about the experience, how to get a story out of it. In fact, I tried to leave that restaurant experience behind me entirely. But it followed me to grad school. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What haunted me was not how physically hard the work had been, but the emotional challenge of it. I was so lonely and isolated. I was working six days a week, twelve hours a day, serving customers who looked right past me. I mean, no one really treats waiters well, but it felt like an extra layer of alienation to be a Chinese waiter in a Chinese restaurant. Like I wasn’t totally seen as human.

I wondered how anyone could last longer than I did (barely a month), yet all my coworkers had been working in that restaurant for years. It led me to compulsively imagine what it would be like to continue to work in that space for months, years, even decades. What would a person do over the years, how would they change in that environment, what kind of life would they make for themselves as a substitute for the outside world, and what would they be willing to give up to sustain that life?

During this time of compulsive imagination, I was also experimenting with ways to write about Chinese American characters without making their race the most important part of them, but it was difficult because the act of naming a character’s race in your writing inadvertently puts a spotlight on it. At the same time, if you don’t name your characters, most readers default your characters to white. I wanted to define a space where the default was Chinese American. That’s when I realized my experience in that restaurant had been a space where the default was just that, and any reader coming into that space would default to a Chinese American experience. The collision of those two ideas created the novel.

I was working six days a week, twelve hours a day, serving customers who looked right past me. It felt like an extra layer of alienation as a Chinese waiter in a Chinese restaurant. Like I wasn’t totally seen as human.

MCB: This book challenges stereotypes of the Chinese restaurant worker, and I got the sense that both Asian and non-Asian readers would be able to relate this novel to their own American experience. Can you talk about constructing a dual readership for a widely varied audience?

LL: In some ways I felt I had written two books. I wrote this book for me, for readers like me, with my cultural background and reference points that I find familiar. I wanted to be uncompromising. At the same time, I understood that a book is something that everybody gets to read, which is to say, anybody can pick up a book and read it. How do I speak to a reader that I did not write the book for? Do I even try to speak to that reader?

I took a lot of inspiration from Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior. In interviews, she said she put “Easter eggs” in Woman Warrior — untranslated words or references, unexplained material that many readers would come across and not notice or recognize, but which wouldn’t distract them from their reading experience. I tried to do something similar in my book, to be uncompromising without being exclusionary. There will be readers who won’t catch any of the Easter eggs, but still enjoy the book, still get something from the experience. However, for the reader who finds those Easter eggs, I want them to feel a moment of communion, to realize that, while this is a book that everyone gets to read, this universally accessible thing has a little moment just for them. I wanted to see if I could have both.

I think it’s also helpful that all readers are, in some way, outsiders in the world of the Duck House. Most Chinese Americans have little experience with the Chinese restaurant space. Even those who have worked, or have family who has worked in a Chinese restaurant will still be partial outsiders because there are so many different kinds of Chinese restaurants, and I tried to write the Duck House to be as specific a kind of restaurant as possible. So in the end, there’s distance for every reader, and I wanted to both close and keep that distance by different degrees for every kind of reader.

MCB: Speaking of closing distances, your characters move so fluidly between speaking English and Chinese that I barely registered the markers. Was that intentional?

LL: I thought a lot about how language was going to be used from the start. In a lot of ways, I wrote this book for myself, and I wanted to replicate how I hear and understand switches between Chinese and English. When I’m talking to my parents, I don’t notice if they’re speaking Chinese or English. What I notice is a change in effort. I notice when they switch from English to Chinese that it’s like they’ve taken a slight weight off their words. The language feels lighter and easier for them. The opposite happens when I switch from English to Chinese. I wanted to try to capture that sensation in the work. I originally wanted no markers at all that something was being said in Chinese or English. I wanted the reader to figure out the language being spoken based on the level of effort in the dialogue. In the end, that was too confusing, and the confusion only called more attention to the switches, not at all my experience with bilingualism.

I also chose not to include pinyin because, again, that points to a self-consciousness in translation that wouldn’t be accurate to the characters who speak Chinese as a first language. I tried always to think about what the characters would notice and what they would hear, rather than what the reader would notice and hear.

MCB: You mentioned that Number One Chinese Restaurant was your master’s thesis at the University of Michigan. Did you feel that your MFA program helped you finish the book?

LL: Definitely. The finished novel looks nothing like my thesis, which was more like a prologue to what became the actual book. In the original manuscript, Jimmy hadn’t even bought the new restaurant until after the first hundred pages.

My classmates and teachers were so helpful in helping me write my way into the novel. Eileen Pollack, one of my thesis readers, was hugely instrumental in helping me learn what the structure of a novel even was. I felt like a baby writing a book. Even though I had read so many books, I didn’t even know how to start a novel. I thought a novel could just be detailing a person’s everyday routine, which some authors can do successfully, but Eileen taught me that most novels look at what happens when that routine is disrupted. I’m sure that’s something most people could learn on their own, but I probably would have written a lot of bad novels before this one if I hadn’t learned so much from people who knew much better.

MCB: Your novel leaps deftly through forty years’ worth of character perspectives. What was your process in organizing the complex maze of plot lines and character histories?

LL: I’ve always loved ensembles, in books, TV, movies. I love communities that both know each other well, and not at all. When I was younger, I wrote a lot of fan-fiction, and I was never interested in the main characters. I was always more interested in side characters, the ones who don’t get much screen time. I thought, “Why don’t we get more of you? You seem really interesting.” So I knew that when I wrote a novel, I’d have multiple perspectives, a real ensemble cast. In terms of how I nailed down the plot and the character histories, in some ways, they ended up being reverse processes.

With the plot, Eileen, again, was instrumental. She gave me this great analogy when she asked me to think of plot as a sequence of dominoes. One plot point creates ripple events that fall to hit the next domino. Of course, then I came to her with fifteen dominoes, and she had to tell me that you really should have at most two or three dominoes. If you have too many plot points, readers have no idea what to invest in and the stakes are constantly in flux. She told me to come up with three big-ass dominoes. I worked a long time to get those dominoes. Once I did, it felt almost like mile markers for a 5k. I wrote until I hit the first marker, and that oriented me enough to get to the second, and so on.

For character histories, I worked backwards instead of forwards. This happened because I came up with characters in tandem with their relationships to each other. For example, I came up with Nan at the same time that I came up with Ah-Jack, because I wanted a friendship that was complicated and intense and long-term. I wanted two brothers with sibling rivalry, so that led to Jimmy and Johnny. I wanted Nan to struggle to maintain a relationship with her child when her restaurant work kept her from being home, and Pat sprang to life. Once I had these specific relationships in mind, I just had to work back from that point. It was a useful guiding light to ask what had to happen to this person in their lifetime, what kind of personality they had to be born with, so that thirty years later they could get into a relationship as weird and specific as the one I’d created. Like with the plot, there was flexibility, but also direction. That’s how I kept the entire book straight in my head.

In a lot of immigrant narratives, people are only ever fighting against external forces, like war or poverty. When they behave badly, it’s because of the tremendous pressure and/or suffering they are experiencing, and it’s much easier to forgive them. What I don’t often see is the immigrant underdog who fucks things up for himself, who faces internal forces like hubris, spite, pettiness, or laziness.

MCB: Craft-wise, you’ve done such a marvelous job with each element that I want to call it a reinvigorated version of the “Great American Novel.” The book had such a satisfying ending for each character too, which I don’t always find.

LL: Realistically, with a timespan of just over a month, I couldn’t expect the characters to be too different from who they were at the start of the book. I understand that it’s satisfying to see someone make radical changes in their life. I love books that show me a better version of ourselves, I find them very comforting and aspirational, but what I write toward is maybe a more honest reflection, which is that it’s really hard for a person to actually change, and that, in some ways, books with really revolutionary character arcs set up unrealistic expectations for our own lives. If people only read novels where big changes happen, I wonder how useful it is when they look back on their own lives and evaluate how they move through the world. Can they really use that book as a model for themselves and the people around them? Maybe what I’m hoping to do is create a more accurate measuring stick to show what change actually looks like on a human scale.

MCB: One of my favorite parts of the novel is the brief internal monologue of Feng Fei, the mother of the two restaurant owners. She describes beautifully the constant struggle between a person’s nature and the stories they tell themselves and others. That theme powers through the whole novel.

LL: That was also my favorite section to write, partially because I finally got to tap into Feng Fei’s internal logic, the values and ideas that dictate her behavior and attitude. In general, I loved accessing all my characters’ internal logics because that was the moment I felt like I really knew them. Every person has their own internal logic to which they tend to be fairly consistent and certain, and I think that consistency creates the familiarity necessary to forge connections between people, even if the logic is flawed or dangerous. I wanted to see if I could make all my characters consistent and convincing in their own logic, and if readers would be persuaded to empathize even when that logic made certain characters act poorly. Like Jimmy, who is consistently an asshole; will readers eventually like him because he has become familiar?

One of the things I wanted to expand in my writing is the idea of the immigrant underdog. What I mean is that I was seeing a lot of immigrant narratives, especially Asian American immigrant narratives, where people are only ever fighting against external forces, like war or poverty. When they behave badly, it’s because of the tremendous pressure and/or suffering they are experiencing, and it’s much easier to forgive them. What I don’t often see is the immigrant underdog who fucks things up for himself, who faces, instead, internal forces like hubris, spite, pettiness, or laziness. It’s harder to love a person who makes their own problems, yet that’s what every single person does. Yes, systemic racism and oppression are always factors — Jimmy acts the way he does in part because he is a Chinese American man in America — but there’s no single reason someone is the way they are; there are ten reasons you can see, and 20,000 reasons you can’t.

Certain novels can feel like lab experiments. So-and-so behaved this way because A and B happened in their childhood, and then incident C catalyzed the reaction, the end. But there are no perfect conditions in life. We will never fully know why we do the things we do, and I want my writing to reflect that mystery and mess.

MCB: One of your characters says near the end, “You are the stories people tell of you.” Getting a bit personal here, what kind of story do you think this book tells about you?

LL: I hope this book is a meeting place, a sort of communion between the reader and myself, a two-way street. Even though the book itself is a static object, the ideas I had while writing it are not. I’m still thinking about them, and I hope the reader can evolve those ideas further too. I want this to be a way for conversations to happen even when I’m not in the room, even if there’s just one person: the reader. That’s the perfect book for me, and I hope in some ways this book will do that.

MCB: Lastly, what question do you wish I had asked you about this book?

LL: A lot of people ask me which authors have influenced my work, but I feel like that’s an answer that I’d prefer other people to answer for me. Instead, I’ve been thinking a lot about asking, instead, “Which authors do you share a worldview with?” The books that resonate the most with me are those in which the authors either share a similar way of looking at and understanding the world and writing’s place in the world, or have a worldview that I aspire to emulate. Two authors who do that for me are Ruth Ozeki and Karen Joy Fowler.

In A Tale for the Time Being, there’s an end that shows the magic and mercy of fiction. Fiction doesn’t always have to be like reality. It gets to have loopholes. It doesn’t always have to follow the rules. There’s something gratifying about authors who know that. They have a chance to fuck up your heart, and they rescue you instead.

Karen Joy Fowler is magical in a different way. Her writing is so funny, and she uses humor to articulate something about the world that I just find incredible. I love The Jane Austen Book Club and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves because both books are uncompromising about the darkness in the world, while also understanding that humor is a way of both elevating that world and resigning yourself to it. The humor is not there to rescue you, but rather a way to deal with things. This is not always the best way out, but sometimes it’s the only way to keep going until you can find a better way out. That’s how I see the world too, and I hope my fiction communicates that.

Finding Black Boy Joy In A World That Doesn’t Want You To

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Ifirst read Darnell Moore’s work in Kiese Laymon’s essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, as part of a letter exchange. I was surprised by the tenderness of the conversation between Laymon, Moore, Mychal Denzel Smith, Kai Green, and Marlon Peterson, which ranged over difficult topics like misogyny and homophobia. In taking on the power structures that often serve to divide Black cis and trans men from each other and the rest of the Black community, this was the kind of Black men’s writing that I, as a queer Black femme, wanted to be reading. So I was excited when I found out that Moore was publishing his own memoir, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America.

I talked to Moore a month before the release of his powerful text, which digs into growing up poor, Black, and queer in the shadow of domestic violence. What does freedom look like in these circumstances? Darnell may not have all the answers, but with his memoir, he opens up a conversation about the idea that we should look for freedom in the midst of structural forces that regularly remind us Black lives are not supposed to matter. After reading the book, I was especially curious about the role that memoir writing plays in getting free. I began by asking about the process of crafting the memoir, and what he wanted Black people — especially Black men — to learn from it.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: You write that you were hesitant about memoir at the beginning. Are your views about that still shifting? Should everyone write a memoir?

Darnell Moore: Memoir is a genre that is an accessible one that all of us can grab hold of. When the book is able to get readers to think differently about things, or to see semblances of themselves, or to have new understandings, that can contribute to the way that they move in the world. This book was really difficult to write, because I went in knowing that I wanted to write a book that combined personal narrative with social and cultural history. And I wanted to do it beautifully, but I also wanted the book to take the shape of something different than I’ve read before.

I often feel like so many people feel pressured to write quickly in response to events or news breaks. I used to do that. I’d write a Facebook post or take to Twitter. And now I’ve been so much more silent because when these things are happening, I’m asking myself, “Okay, let’s think about this.” And this is what this writing process has allowed. So in some ways I feel I’m missing time or I’m missing things, and in another way I feel so free, and so much more prepared, I think, to think critically about things that require or demand of us to be patient. And by patient, I mean to offer ourselves the type of grace, time, and critical distance necessary to have something to say that is grounded, in a type of nuanced way that it requires.

So many people feel pressured to write quickly in response to events or news breaks. I used to do that. And now I’ve been so much more silent.

CPW: In No Ashes you describe the enormous pressures that come with being poor and queer, and how you struggled with depression and the idea of suicide. At one point you say, “Writing about it now feels too theoretical, too poetic, but self-distraction is material, overwhelmingly felt and embodied.” Did you worry about the book being read as what is sometimes called “poverty pornography”?

DM: I remember saying, “I need to say this here.” Because it was at the point of the book where I was talking about suicidal ideation — and attempts. And when I was reading it back I said, “This can mistakenly be read as some poetic ass writing about someone on the brink of a life.” It can almost read so theoretical or almost poetic that it lacks the emotional current that was present during that time, during that experience. And I didn’t want to have the reader believe that even now, given that time has passed, that it’s somehow bereft of the emotional tremors I had experienced in real time. That even in that moment, it was a sort of visitation of the emotional weight that those memories carry.

I really did fear that the book could be, if I wasn’t careful enough, read and interpreted as exploitative. Another story of Black trauma and the eventual overcoming. Or at least, even this sort of nihilistic struggle that also lacked joy, and that lacked love, and that lacked community. All of those things had to be interpreted as appearing together.

I really did fear that the book could be read as exploitative. Another story of Black trauma and the eventual overcoming.

Part of what I wanted to do in a book, too, was to have folks have emotional connections and experiences, so I was trying to write in such a way that folks can not only understand but feel the struggle. What does it mean to have a mom who was practically a single mother, even though my father was around, who was working at a minimum wage job and doing everything she could? Using all of her money to make sure that we are okay, that we could have a Christmas that looks something like what you might see on TV. That is the sort of every day type of mundane shit that so many single women, single moms, who are also economically disenfranchised, undergo, that goes missing when all we wanna do is concentrate on their ability to be “strong” women. That work is not without struggle, and it is not without pain.

CPW: How did you learn to kind of thrive despite the racism and homophobia you faced, and what advice do you have for barrier breakers coming behind you?

DM: Part of what I tried to also illuminate in the book is the value of community, and what I call radical love. It was the presence of caring people and also self-realization. A big part of the book is about the struggle of this young boy, of myself, trying to know who the fuck I was in the world. Trying to love the parts of me, all of me really, the world had taught me to despise. My Blackness, the color of my skin, my lips, my queerness, the sort of quirkiness that I presented with, and my gender expression.

It wasn’t until much later, and part of that self-realization came through my mother being a mirror for me. To be able to mirror that affirmation was pivotal in my being alive. That moment when she sat in my office and said, “I love you. I see you.” I would not be here if it wasn’t for the people in my life, which is why my story is so much about others’ ability to be present, in helping me to be.

CPW: Thinking of yourself as an editor and a literary leader, and someone who’s about to be on the road for several months having conversations about toxic masculinity, and how men of color interact with non-binary, genderqueer, and cis women of color. What are our responsibilities to the people we’ve previously harmed?

DM: Writing about the harm one has brought in other people’s lives requires some thought about ethics. I’m clear about the particular ways that women, cis-gender, and transgender experience misogyny and trans-misogyny at the hands of men. I’m also clear about the ways that queer men, trans men can also reproduce those actions. I don’t want to remove us from these conversations.

I think within literature, it’s important to not see literature, or the canvas of the page, as an opportunity to work out our complicated natures, and the harms we’ve done only — without taking into account the way that writing can also re-inscribe, and harm in additional type of ways. That means that there has to be some deep thought around, “Why are you writing what you’re writing and to what extent?” Kiese Laymon has talked about this quite a bit. If the extent of the writing is such that one needs to air these things out on paper, so as to prevent the possible onslaught of accusations, then that’s the wrong reason to write.

If the intent is to name what the harm is after being in conversation with the person whom you harmed, gaining their consent and ensuring they’re okay, making sure they are okay with you sharing the story or not, that’s the ethical mandate that I think is essential, right? So I shared my writing with most of the folk included in the book. A big part of it was sharing with them, and giving them the option to consent to their stories being shared or opting out altogether. For example, I talk about a moment in the book where I was arguing with a former partner and I swung at him. I gave him the option to read and to let me know if this was okay to share.

A big part of it was sharing with them, and giving them the option to consent to their stories being shared or opting out altogether.

CPW: What do we do with that energy, without getting into a politics of disposability?

DM: I’m still thinking through this. I’m glad you use the word disposability, because that is what I am trying to unpack in the book, about a commitment to not disposing of Black people. In a world that is hell-bent on disposing of us before we are even here, right? Because of the way I’m read as a certain type of man, even as a certain type of queer man, that for those who exist closest to the edges of the margins the stakes are much higher, I want to be clear that talking about disposability becomes a complicated conversation. So I want to be clear that I am not insinuating we ought not be held accountable when we commit wrongs or that we’re all at the place where we have to be committed to this politics of non-disposability. When, in fact, it is because of structural conditions, that there are some of us who show up in the world by virtue of the way we express ourselves via our gender presentations, by virtue of womanhood, and our trans-ness, or what have you, for whom opting out of that process is not an option.

And, yet, I am still thinking through what communal healing might look like — one that centers those who have been harmed and seeks to aid the wrongdoer in their quest for atonement and transformation — that does not begin and end with punishment or incarceration. For someone like my mom, I thank goodness there was some intervention. I hate that we had to call the cops to get my dad out the house when he tried to kill her. But I am also imagining a world where we can think about a different response, without the police. In the absence of the alternative, we had to do what we had to do.

I am still thinking through what communal healing might look like that does not begin and end with punishment or incarceration.

CPW: I think my single favorite line in the book was, “My failure to be the man I assumed others wanted me to become loomed, but some shit we fail at should be counted as a win.” I really love that because I actually think that women need to hear that right now, from cis men. How do we talk about misogyny without centering the men engaging in it, and at the same time recognizing that they are whole human beings that do need to be centered in some kind of dialogue?

DM: I should give credit right away to Jack Halberstam’s book, Queer Art of Failure, which years ago had been critical to my understanding of notions of failure as it relates to what it means to deaden the sort of dreams or norms that are provided to us via white supremacist capitalist hetero patriarchy, right? And Jack’s work is the sort of theoretical foundation that helps me to think through what it means to fail at the things that we are told make us good men, or good White people, via majoritarian group norms. What might it mean to upset those things? But you know, I try not to let myself off the hook in the book either. I’ve received the critique you offered in terms of how I might have been better able to think about how patriarchy put my mom in the position to have to do some of the things she did, not necessarily because she wanted to.

And that’s real. I think if my mom had a choice, and that she could speak on her own terms, some of the decisions she made, she probably didn’t wanna have to make, right? But this is what patriarchy and its consequences put her in position to do. So, the way that I dealt with that was to really try my best to do the work of self-reflective analysis, if that makes sense. And I tried to think about how the very forces that I name as problematic and violent, whether they be patriarchy or homo-antagonism, anti-blackness. I found myself struggling through, impacted by, shaped by. My behaviors, my expressions, and the ways in which I have been guilty of perpetuating those things.

When it comes to cis men, I don’t expect cis or trans women to teach me how not to do the shit that brings them harm. That’s not their job. It is ours, right? And the first work I think, then, is analyzing to what extent we are all, the extent to which I am, implicated in these processes. And by we, I mean the folk who exist on the side of power, and who utilize that power to do harm and or gain access.

The Book That Fueled My Eating Disorder

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Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. This time, we asked: What’s a book you misunderstood?

One day when I was in high school, I started a diet. I don’t remember why, only that I went home after school and was so hungry that I laid in bed and cried. I was too hungry to read, to do homework, to watch TV; I tried to fall asleep. Over months I became accustomed to a level of hunger that until that point had been unimaginable to me. I still ate, because my family would have noticed if I stopped altogether, but not much: a small bowl of dry Cheerios in the morning, a no-fat Yoplait whipped yogurt at lunch, the smallest portion I could manage of whatever my mother had made for dinner. I thought that about 500 calories a day was appropriate. My period stopped, I noticed a layer of fuzzy blonde hair emerging on my back, and everyone commented on how slight I was. I was already thin, so probably people thought I was just a little more thin than I had been. A growth spurt, being a teenager.

Fifteen years out, the strangest thing to me about this time was how extensively I researched what I was doing to myself. I remember going to the library weekly, memorizing the aisle where I could find books on anorexia and other eating disorders, reading about women who one day had simply stopped eating. Even as I was eating so little that I would be caught by dizzy spells every time I stood, I was fascinated and repulsed by women who had taken things so far that they were sent to the hospital or even died. Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa was a particular obsession, a book I checked out repeatedly.

It’s well known that girls with anorexia tend to research their own eating disorder, and misuse the available resources. For every website listing the signs of an eating disorder, there is at least one girl with an eating disorder reviewing that list to be sure she doesn’t reveal any of them, but also to assess her own qualifications. In my obsessive, cruel dieting, I considered stories of anorexia as some sort of a guide: do what these women did so successfully, only a little less. This was still early days of the internet, and I logged on a few times to read through forums of women discussing and supporting one another in their anorexia — forums I learned about through one of my library books, though I don’t remember which one. If the world around these women was telling them they were sick, they could come to this website and reaffirm their commitment to a near-total abstinence from food. Probably luckily for me, something about these discussions horrified me, and I retreated to the library’s selection of five or ten books on the subjects.

It’s well known that girls with anorexia tend to research their own eating disorder, and misuse the available resources.

What made Fasting Girls such an intriguing book for me was how it placed anorexia, and my own diet and confused feelings about my body, within a history of disordered eating. It turned out that anorexia wasn’t a new thing but went back centuries, to medieval women whose ability to survive without food was a miracle. It was a history, but it was also a guide and an encouragement: here is how this woman did it, and this, and this. As someone who writes about anorexia, Jacobs Brumberg likely knows that some of the readers of her history are finding it not because they are curious about the topic but because they are obsessed by it, because they need to understand their own inability to ingest food. While I read the entire book, it was the modern section that obsessed me, her placing this disease into the more recognizable world of asylums and psychiatry and forced feeding. Jacobs Brumberg’s writing could be dry, and I wonder if this wasn’t part of the appeal: unlike the forums that would have provided more “useful” guidance, her work was scholarly, something I could explain away — to others and to myself — as a matter of historical rather than personal interest.

That fall, I worked in a Christmas shop in my small town, selling expensive glass ornaments and creepy old-fashioned dolls, made of newsprint under their dresses and selling for a hundred dollars apiece. My most distinct memory of the job is my habit of walking into ornaments, clueless and confused. Every week, there was another shattered $50 ornament that I had to write down in a spiral-bound notebook next to the register. One day, walking around the owner’s house after putting our store’s sign out on the street, I walked straight into a clear decorative glass orb she hung from the porch, breaking it and leaving myself with a bruise and a throbbing headache. The crash was so loud that the whole family came running out to see what had happened. These have for years been some of my best work stories, examples of my endless clumsiness, but all those ornaments would have probably been safe if I just let myself eat a decent meal. When you aren’t eating, life becomes one endless battle against dizziness and hunger, but I remained devoted to the idea that I could be one of these overachieving girls with such impressive willpower I could literally starve myself into nothing, into a person who would vanish when you turned her sideways. I would go home from work and pull my library books from under the bed, find in them an encouragement to not give up.

I had forgotten about Fasting Girls until a few months ago, when I read Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder for my book club. The Wonder is about a nurse who’s been assigned to watch a young girl who is apparently surviving on air — a miracle. Donoghue must have read some of the same books I had obsessed over as a teenager, in researching her story. The Wonder is in part about the tradition of the original “fasting girls,” the namesakes for Jacobs Brumberg’s work. Once the nurse figures out that the girl is in fact starving herself, that she is a troubled child rather than a miracle, the novel becomes a question of how you can fix a physical problem that is actually a mental one. How do you talk someone into eating, when she’s become convinced that the only way to fix her world is to not eat?

Although it’s not an abnormal behavior for someone with anorexia or disordered dieting, it seems strange to me now how carefully and incorrectly I read Fasting Girls. I wasn’t interested in diet books or pro-anorexia forums, but a book that enabled me to intellectualize the harm I was doing to my body had an appeal. The idea of the fasting girls brought with it some idea of reaching another plane of thought and faith, and maybe that’s what I thought I could find — not realizing that by trying to erase my body, my flesh, it would become literally the only thing I could think about. I became more earthbound the more I tried not to eat.

I wasn’t interested in diet books or pro-anorexia forums, but a book that enabled me to intellectualize the harm I was doing to my body had an appeal.

In the end, it was probably my peculiar obsession with Jacobs Brumberg’s work that saved me from crossing the border that separates excessive dieting from the disordered eating that sends you to a hospital and then rehab. Newspaper and magazine stories often unintentionally dramatize their anorexic subjects in a way that is endlessly appealing to a teenager like the one I was. Tell me how much she weighs, how large her arms are, what size pants she wears, and I’ll take those as goals. Tell me how many calories she ate every day, how often she weighed herself, and I’ll do the same. But I could only find these articles by chance — not everything was posted and searchable online at the time — while I could always return to the library, to my same few books. And although I misused her book, I don’t remember Jacobs Brumberg adding any appeal to the idea of anorexia. Parts of Fasting Girls were boring, and I returned to it more for comfort and a sense of my own location than for anything else. I remember her history being a sad one, of offering me a sense of what a waste my actions might make me.

I must have agonized over the decision, but now all I remember is waking up one day and deciding I needed to change. I would eat a regular meal with my family — the whole meal, not picking around the edges. It had been months since I’d had my period and suddenly, something about that frightened me. I realized I had gone too far. Over months I began to eat again, and to avoid the library aisle where I’d spent so much of my time over the previous months. My period returned. Over the following years I sometimes took my incorrect eating in the other direction, staying up late at night to eat muffins surreptitiously purchased from Wawa, entire cartons of Tastykake donuts; then trying, again, to limit myself. I was probably in my late twenties before I felt tentatively secure in my sense of my own body and how I should treat it.

Writing this, I thought I should find a copy of Fasting Girls. I should flip back through it, and remind myself of why I returned to it so many times as a teenager. But my library doesn’t have a copy — one of the largest library systems in the country, probably, and not a single copy. I felt such palpable relief at seeing that blank page. Even fifteen years later, knowing how badly I misunderstood and misused Jacobs Brumberg’s writing, I don’t trust myself to approach it again. I worry that I might fall back in, that whatever part of me aspired to be a worthy subject of her research is still in there, ready to make my body a manageable thing.

9 Anti-Beach Reads for Summer Goths

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The official start to summer is fast approaching and along with sun-soaked days comes an onslaught of earnest “beach reads recommendations” from publishers, magazines, and even your next-door-neighbor. But what the fuck is a beach read anyway?

In short: a beach read is pleasurable. It’s an escapist experience that draws you in like a receding tide and deposits you right back on shore when you’re done. It could also be that book that you whip out in public so that everyone can see your dazzling wit — no judgement, we all like to show off a fancy cover every now and then.

But what if you don’t want to read a light, fluffy book with a happily-ever-after that leaves you feeling like a mermaid unicorn? From a novel about the violence of the prison-industrial complex to an anthology on rape culture to a short story collection about the ugly side of nature, these 9 anti-beach reads will leave you filled with terror, rage, or melancholia.

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Set in a beautiful beach resort in Montego Bay, Jamaica, sisters Margot and Thandi live their days surrounded by white sand and breathtaking ocean views. Sounds like a perfect beach novel, right? Too bad paradise is only surface deep. Margot, a closeted lesbian, sacrifices her body to white tourists so Thandi, the family’s greatest hope, can have a good education and become a doctor, lifting their family out of poverty. Thandi, however, is more interested in becoming beautiful and secretly bleaches her skin. As the community falls apart at the hands of white developers, Margot fights for financial stability, sexual autonomy, and the hopes of a better life.

Innocence Is a Privilege: Black Children Are Not Allowed to Be Innocent in America

Demi-Gods by Eliza Robertson

It is the summer of 1950 in Salt Spring Island, Canada, nine-year-old Willa’s childhood is upended by the arrival of her mom’s new boyfriend and his two sons, Kenneth and Patrick. Her sister Joan and Kenneth immediately form a sweet and tender relationship, while Willa finds herself inexplicably attracted to Patrick despite becoming the victim of his sadomasochistic acts. Spanning decades and countries, Willa struggles to break free from the sinister, hypnotic hold that Patrick has over her until an act of desperation that ends badly for everyone.

The Good Son by You Jeong Jeong

When twenty-six-year-old Yu-jin find his mother’s bloody corpse and a distressing gap in his memory, a combination of denial and horror sets him off on a search for those lost hours. The horror has only just begun. As Yu-jin soon discovers, uncovering one truth has the unfortunate consequence of unearthing countless more. The first of You Jeong Jeong’s novels to be translated into English, this psychological murder mystery subverts the usual cliches of its genre with a relatively early reveal, but this only adds to the tension that carries you through the rest of the story. The intense focus on the psychology of the perpetrator and the unreliability of the narrator bring out a sense of paranoia that leads one distrust their own perceptions.

There There by Tommy Orange

Split between twelve characters, There There crosses multiple generations in a portrait of disorientation and rediscovery. This contemporary epic traces the paths of urban Native Americans, who experience the disconnect between historical representation and collective memory. Interspersed between the twelve characters’ journeys to the Big Oakland Powwow, Orange embeds clippings of a traumatic past — stories of sacrifice, loss, and tradition that can only begin to correct a miswritten record.

Tommy Orange Gives Voice to Urban Native Americans

Florida by Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff’s new short story collection drowns her characters in their own emotional turmoil and tosses them to the mercy of nature. Some stories in this collection follow children, others a single person or an entire family enclosed by woods, but in every case Florida — as a state, as a landscape, as a collection of individuals — provides an uneasy backdrop. Metaphor and reality become difficult to distinguish as the wilderness looms threateningly in the peripheries of every tale.

Lauren Groff on Climate Change and Ugly Feelings

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

Inmate W314159 becomes Romy Hall’s new identity the second a pair of metal shackles enclose her wrists. Life inside a women’s prison bares no resemblance to the life she lived outside in Northern California. Outside she had her son and a childhood in San Francisco. Inside she only experiences violence from other inmates, guards, and the justice system itself. Kushner witnessed life in California women’s prisons first hand, collecting personal histories to better understand and portray the world inside the system. Beautifully written, the novel depicts the painful truth of prison as an ugly, absurd place where even sunlight is a luxury.

Rachel Kushner Thinks Prisons Should Only Exist in Fiction

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture by Roxane Gay

Not That Bad collects essays and personal accounts from women who refuse to accept the silence that surrounds rape culture. The title itself drips with the indignant sarcasm that serves as a uniting theme for the book. Sad as it is to say, we live in a rape culture, and Not That Bad serves as a vehicle to speak out against that culture. Edited by bestselling author Roxane Gay, the anthology of both new and previously published pieces is tragic, moving, and a necessary read in the #MeToo era.

Spring by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Translated from Norwegian, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiography is framed as an attempt to explain to his newborn daughter why her mother is not around. The entirety of the book takes place over a single day. He wakes up, feeds his daughter, attends to his other three children, and suffers the quiet breakdown of his own spirit, all the while tiptoeing around the absence of his wife. Saturated with paternal affection and bitter introspection, Spring — following in the wake of Autumn, Winter, and My Struggle — borders on prose poetry as it wades into the depression that plagues a family.

Karl Ove Knausgaard On Writing Habits, Conversation, and Why They’re Both Kind of Dumb

The Boatbuilder by Daniel Gumbiner

Berg was hardworking guy until a concussion left him with brain injury and an addiction to painkillers. He breaks into strangers’ houses to raid their medicine cabinets for opiates. On a downward spiral to rock bottom, Berg Berg’s path crosses with a reclusive master boatbuilder who presents him an opportunity to move forward with his life. Fear, addiction, and resilience war with one another in this small town in Northern California.

Wrestling with “Angels in America”

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I have read Angels in America so many times, and was reading it so constantly for such a concentrated period of my life, that I have no memory of reading it for the first time. Or rather, my memory of reading it for the first time spans roughly from the beginning of high school until I moved away to college. My parents saw the play in many of its early incarnations — in San Francisco in the famously baggy, improvised, thrown-together and magical production that at once made famous and tore apart the Eureka Theater, and again, a few years later, in its original Tony-award winning production on Broadway, over the course of two consecutive nights. I didn’t attend any of these productions with them — I was too young to see a play that definitely had dicks in it.

But for some reason, a few years later I bought a copy (at the time, a two-volume laminated edition, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika each their own slim volume, Perestroika significantly heftier, held together in a plastic case), when I was maybe fourteen. I lost those copies of the plays years ago in a move or a breakup, after dragging them around with me through a significant portion of my adult life, the laminated edges curling away from each other, my spindly high-school-student notes littering the margins, my favorite passages stained and crinkled. I lost track of a lot of possessions through an irresponsible and precarious experience of my twenties, and most of them were easy to give up, shrug at, write off the loss, but these I will never quite forgive myself for losing. But anyway, I picked it up this play around age fourteen, and then didn’t really ever stop reading it for the next four years.

My endless rereading of Angels in America while I was growing up may be the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religious experience. I kept my copy next to my bed, could quote any piece of it from memory, and eventually started to use phrases from it in my own speech without even realizing I was doing so. I would open the text at random and read a few scenes as a balm whenever I had had a bad day. I understand this is basically analogous to a how a devout Christian person might form a relationship with their Bible. But even that comparison is something my obsessive reading of Angels taught me to make. Angels is a secular play obsessed with religion, a play looking for the traces of faith in every human act, a play that insists on raising the visible and familiar events of life into the grandeur of the Old Testament. It is a play unsure it believes in angels, ghosts, gods, or prophets in which angels, ghosts, gods, and prophets are all literal characters on the stage. It is a play about how we knowingly or unknowingly grapple with the religions of our country, our family, our ancestors, about the way religion is knit into the bones of how we feel what we feel. My dogged and grandiose insistence on religion-based metaphors, and probably even my tendency to date people with serious and fraught religious upbringings, likely is due to how much I read Angels in America as a teenager.

My endless rereading of Angels in America while I was growing up may be the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religious experience.

I was 32 years old when I experienced Angels for the first time as anything other than text on a page. In the wake of the wonderful Slate piece that became the even more wonderful The World Only Spins Forward, an oral history of the play, I decided that my husband Thomas and I should watch the HBO movie together. Thomas had never read the play, and wasn’t familiar with it at all, and I had never seen the HBO movie because I was too familiar with the play and was afraid to watch it.

Lots of people — I suspect I’m one of them — talk about the tender beauty of sharing the experience of a thing one loves with a person one loves when the person is unfamiliar with that thing. It’s true that it is possible for this to be a beautiful affirmation, an alchemical joining-together, but what’s more true is that this experience can only exist on the extremes of a spectrum: It is either beautiful and transcendent or extremely shitty for everyone involved. And more often, it’s the latter. It’s nearly impossible to go into this situation in a fair and reasonable way. I fundamentally don’t believe that we should decide how we feel about people based on their taste in art, but the simple truth is that Angels in America is so embedded in my understanding of not just myself but of what humans are and what love is that it would have shaken the foundations of my feelings for this person if he hadn’t loved it — which is a horrible thing to think, especially because there are lots of perfectly good reasons not to love this particular text. The stakes were way too high for either of us to enjoy it; I breathlessly watched his reaction more than I watched the movie, which in and of itself guaranteed he couldn’t actually enjoy, or even really pay attention to, the movie. I hadn’t realized — though of course I should have — that the text would be changed somewhat from the old printed version I had once had, and every time a single line was rewritten or left out, I felt like a personal injury had been done to me. If we define ourselves too much by loving a particular work of art, we risk eclipsing the work entirely, shutting ourselves out from it, in the same suffocating way it is possible to love a person and drive them away by doing so. Thomas read the play afterwards, at my urging, but never had the life-altering reaction to it I expected, at least not visibly. The truth was that he couldn’t have; I had stacked all the cards too perfectly against him.

When Marianne Eliot’s anniversary revival of Angels in America, first at the National Theatre in London and then on Broadway, was announced, I felt mostly offended and inconvenienced by it. This is how I usually feel when something I really love and have loved for a long time is made slightly more public and available in the world. It was the sinking feeling of waking up to find out that for some reason everyone on Twitter is talking about some work of art I have kneaded into the recipe for what I understand as a self, and it turns out that all these other people care about it too. It feels like coming home to discover that a crowd of other people want to sleep in my bed because they, for some deluded reason, think that this is actually their bed. Sometimes in museums, near to pieces of art that have meant a great deal to me, I want to cover the canvas with my body, block it off from anyone else seeing it, a private room between the work and myself. Seeing that many other people have had the exact same personality-forming experiences that I have had makes me want to stand on something tall and shout like a child trying to be noticed at an adults’ party. I spent way too much money buying tickets to see the revival of Angels; it was the thing there was to do about it.

I was miserable and jumpy when I sat down to see Part One, so hell-bent on the experience being perfect that I nearly ruined it. But then the lights went down and the play itself overwhelmed all the ways I had made it about myself, which is among the best things we can hope for art to do. I got swept up in the lives of these people, these characters I have known for so long that I just think of them as people, in the way my family are people, the genderqueer, oversexed, weird-poetry-speaking Angel like an aunt you look forward to seeing at Thanksgiving. Even though the production was uneven, I had forgotten how much fun this play is, how aside from everything weighty and important and heartbreaking about it, it also works as a roller coaster ride. Part of the joy was being able to reconnect with my thirteen-year-old self through it; Angels was so much a part of my adolescence that actually seeing it onstage functioned as time travel. But at the same time, it was a meaningful record of difference, of how both my relationship to the world, and the world itself, had changed. (My tendency to over-rely on big and nebulously meaningless words like “the world” in my writing is also, by the way, the fault of Angels in America).

When I first read Angels in America, it seemed to contain the entire universe. I was at the time, at hinge of adolescence, more than anything else looking for examples of bigness, in art but in everything else as well, anywhere in the world that might offer them, in personality, identity, celebrity, love, books, cars, music, whatever. I knew I was larger — literally and figuratively — than I was supposed to be, especially as a teenage girl, and I wanted some kind of affirmation that this was a way I could live successfully, and that my relation to largeness, to my in-every-sense tendency to hyperbole did not have to be one of unending, grinding shame. I fell so hard for Angels because it was the largest thing I had yet found. Not one thing about about Angels is economical. Reading The World Only Spins Forward, I learned that most people think Millennium Approaches, the first of the two parts, is the better play, mainly because it’s more tightly written and constructed, better polished and edited. This is probably the same reason I’ve always liked Part Two, Perestroika — too long, baggy, weird, saying everything it has to say three times in three different ways to make sure it got said fully — best of the two. It is just so unreasonably large, so unnecessary, so swaggeringly magnanimous in its ridiculous size.

When I first read Angels in America, it seemed to contain the entire universe.

But seeing it on stage, what surprised me most was that Angels felt small — my experiences had gotten larger and I could see the play had edges and limits. There is plenty of life that this work does not even touch, and those omissions seem far more glaring from a greater perspective, as a person who has lived beyond her teen years. There were many scenes or statements that I found thin or with which I disagreed. I had sometimes wondered, since first reading it, why it was that as a relatively privileged teenager living in a homogenous upper-middle-class Northern California suburb, I had connected so deeply with this play about the mid-1980s AIDS crisis in New York City, but rewatching it, it was easy to say why the play’s surprisingly limited perspective would appeal to exactly that kind of person. Like many works of art I grew up thinking contained the whole world, it in fact only contained the very specific world of a very specific sort of people. At BuzzFeed, Steven Thrasher writes eloquently about Angels’ “terrible racial politics,” which “[give] the impression that black American queerness exists only in relation to white, gay men.” Thrasher points out correctly that “it’s important to ask who gets to tell mainstream AIDS stories in America, and to consider why this one — about white, gay men who don’t really engage in any political resistance — keeps getting retold.” Angels is an extraordinarily limited story, but it was easy to see why, as a sheltered white teenager, to me it felt like the whole world.

Angels is a narrow story primarily focused on the concerns of a very specific type of white man. The women, as Thrasher also points out, “are caricatures,” or at least far thinner and less sympathetic, less capacious, than their more numerous male counterparts. I can see from a distance that my obsession with this play in some ways opened my mind, but in some ways reinforced my interest in a small subset of stories, and my conviction that men’s narratives would always be more interesting than my own. Echo chambers by nature feel much larger than they actually are; that’s how they’re built to work. More than anything, I realized after seeing it on stage this year, Angels reminded me of my experience of Twitter, both how I once thought it was some strange and messy utopia, and how, in the years since then, it became clear that Twitter is not a universe but an echo chamber. The play and the website share a lot in common: Everyone is very angry and sick and everyone is horny on main. Everyone has big things to say about God and America. There are a lot of breathtaking two-sentence sentiments that sound perfect but maybe don’t hold together when examined. They both think New York City is the entire world, and talk about middle America while actually having little to no experience or understanding of middle America. There are a lot of white men yelling, and a lot of relatively questionable statements about mental health. But when each one works, it glitters and seems to offer every available answer, packed to the gills with love around every corner. It makes a very small part of human experience feel like the size of the cosmos. It creates a space in which every hyperbole is honored. Twitter once seemed to me to contain the whole world; part of the process of maturation has been realizing that it is a very small collection of voices whose smallness both represents and is a product of the limited nature of my own experience.

The work that was formative for any of us is always going to be more about ourselves than about the work. But one of the responsibilities, and the joys, of aging alongside art we love is being able to consciously step back from it, to try to disentangle it from our own personal narratives. This is a difficult process, and carries the risk of being disappointed by the thing one loves. But in return, it offers perhaps the closest thing to the experience of getting to read or watch something again as though for the first time. In 2018, Angels in America is a cultural artifact, a relic of a bygone piece of history. To ask whether it is a period piece in the same breath as asking whether it’s still relevant misses the point: It is relevant because it is a period piece. Angels is a history lesson, but it was maybe always written to be one. It can no longer even be read as a comprehensive history of the era it portrays, but it no longer seems like one. Its limited viewpoint makes it a very well-written play, rather than a bible. It is as useful for showing how and why certain people’s stories achieved an unwarranted centrality as anything else, but that in itself is a history lesson.

One of the responsibilities, and the joys, of aging alongside art we love is being able to consciously step back from it.

As a preteen reading the play for the first time, the exhortation “the great work begins” felt personal, something to pick up and run with. I was very young and naive and willing to join myself to most any grandiose statement. Watching it today, I felt almost the reverse. The most relevant and useful aspect of the play is the way in which it is about failure, both in content and form. Most of the characters in it fail, but so does the play, the “great work” itself. It’s worth noting that a great many of the productions whose history Kois and Butler’s book details were also failures, often resulting in crisis, bankruptcy, or obliteration for the theaters that staged the play. Most grandiose things fail; most stories that attempt to be comprehensive betray their own limits and smallness instead, coming to rest on the ambivalences and inabilities that characterize the play’s central characters. It is hard to believe that, as Prior tells us in the play’s last moments, “the world only spins forward,” looking from where we were in the 1980s to where we are today. But that benediction as the lights come up still feels hopeful, that in the midst of failure, we could still attempt to find a sort of magical ongoing in our small and limited lives, to see our narrow stories as vaster than they really deserve to be.

Perhaps part of the great work the play asks us to begin is the work of dismantling our near-religious attachments to art or ideas that formed our identities when we were younger, and to move outward into engagement with stories that do not so easily reflect that familiar back to ourselves. I was relieved, walking out into Times Square at the end of Part Two, to find that Angels still felt insistently magical, overwhelmingly human. Admitting the way in which the play has not entirely aged well, the way in which its limits and flaws have grown clearer, allowed me to feel able to access it again, as one work of art rather than as the whole world.

This Is What America Has Come To

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SOMETIMES BY LOSING A BATTLE YOU FIND A NEW WAY TO WIN A WAR

Herded into Walmart (big arms
profiteers)

to live in the aisles of glittering Big C
where the bare shelves says it all:

make money,

these are boys, ages 10–17.

Hate does not
dissolve like jell-o, it hardens with ICE.

The big war hero is referring to
a 1985 real estate deal

blocked by NYC tenants. He refused
repairs, begged the city to house

the homeless
in the building to get rid of the tenants
who won. Thirty-three years ago.

Even cruder men,
(meaning “mankind” except for the “kind,
but including women),

politicos (the rapt collective) call on god
to justify –

I get off FB, its talons tight,
ready to drop me from a great height.

The Walmart shelf’s empty but for
the rock
a mother gave her son (rocks survive

gassing).

Don’t forget the angry fathers,

and the shelves, their miles wicking desire –

O let me have that
like your own Felix
and the tired immigrant who is everyone’s grandfather (yes,

Native Americans came from elsewhere)
who rolls the cart fast to checkout.

(is the soap they offer stone?)

Mothers call coyotes to return
to certain death

so senators can say See
how greedy we are, O say can you see?

O the letters I write, the calls I make –
(they’ll come for us next)

the parents hundreds of miles away,
not shopping, not paying taxes
not weeding
not cleaning
not tending our children.

Stay
where you are, says the movie,
say the cowards (we get the brave ones).

They were not frozen the way we are,
waiting for elections
to be overseen by Russians,
as if our lives

depended on it.
Try to smile, we tell them.

MEN WRECKING THE GOD PLACE

Only pirates elect their captain
but we trump, trump, trump them.

Who is less responsible in the long line
of Not me from one president to the next?

Cumulative, like rain. Drums beat the main streets,
the main sheets, as rain always has.

Rations, yes, we hold our nearly empty cups
to our mouths, and our humanness, that mess,

gets excreted over the side, but this time
the ocean won’t take it. We stand in it,

we pray for more storm. Some sacrifice to the gods,
collect those oranges, drink the proffered wine.

The miracle: rainbows spread democratically
beyond the stern where imperfect sailors stand

on imagined solid ground, witless, good only for
interplanetary export, more planets that need

to be taken down or seined out of the water
reflecting us, so needy, so Narcissus.

About the Author

Terese Svoboda’s seventh book of poetry is Professor Harriman’s Steam Air-Ship (Eyewear). She has poems forthcoming in Poetry, Manoa, Juked, and Tupelo Quarterly. Great American Desert, a book of stories, will be published next year.

“Sometimes By Losing a Battle You Find a New Way to Win a War” and “Men Wrecking the God Place” are published here by permission of the author, Terese Svoboda. Copyright © Terese Svoboda 2018. All rights reserved.

How to Translate a Murder

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Dorthe Nors is a writer in motion: at home in the city and the countryside, observant of the changes in her surroundings, of the minutiae in the relationship she holds with the environment. It makes her more alert, creative in her work. Born in Herning, on the Danish peninsula of Jutland, she can be seen wandering on the West coast near Ringkøbing, where she now lives, or walking through the streets of Nørrebro, in Copenhagen, may be visiting friends in Århus where she studied literature and art history. She feels comfortable with both, the novel and short story form, and her collection, “Karate Chop,” won the P.O. Enqvist Literary Prize in 2014.

I met Dorthe Nors in early May, when she came to Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels to talk about her most recent novel, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, which was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2017. The novel will be released in the U.S. this month. She has worked as a translator and is interested in the implications of transferring meaning between two languages. Sonja, the protagonist of Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, is a translator of crime fiction, and finds herself in an existential trap. In her 40s, she’s losing the fascination she’d once found in translating crime novels. In the city she cannot escape because she cannot even drive. She can no longer find a connection with her sister Kate, who stayed back in their home town and is married with children.

In her novels and short stories, Nors explores the darker sides of human nature, exposes them to the eye of the reader because there is no point in looking away. It is the job of a writer to present the mirror of what has been ignored or overlooked. Nors writes modern fiction with a piercing yet empathetic eye and we discussed this and other topics in her work from uprooting oneself and misogyny to family and friendship.

Mauricio Ruiz: In Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, the protagonist, Sonja, is a translator of a Swedish crime writer, Gösta Svensson, who writes of violent acts against women and children. You mentioned that when Sonja lends her language to translate these kinds of stories, it has an effect on her. Can you elaborate on this?

Dorthe Nors: Language is a dangerous, wonderful, powerful and very transformative thing. Wasn’t it William S. Burroughs who suggested it was a virus from outer space? Well, language forms us. Apart from giving us the power to speak our mind, it also influences us or even manipulates us. There’s a reason why dictators speak in specific ways, and why political systems will use (and abuse) language in order to control the masses and stay in power. It’s no secret that translation can be both uplifting and damaging to the soul.

It’s no secret that translation can be both uplifting and damaging to the soul.

As a writer, borrowing your voice to somebody else’s language is a beautiful and sometimes brave thing to do. For a couple of years I translated books and found that, after spending 4–5 months with somebody else’s language, I would be able to pretty much make a psychological profile on them. I tell you this well aware that my English translator Misha Hoekstra, who I work closely with in the translation process, probably knows more about me than I think he does. A translator I know translated Shakespeare. Knowing how close a good translator gets to the material, I asked him whether Shakespeare was a nice person or not. He said he was absolutely wonderful. I asked a German translator of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen the same question and he immediately said, “Such an obnoxious man!” Lending your voice and your language to a writer whose literature circles around murdering women will of course have an affect on the translator. At least it does have an effect on Sonja in the book. The big difference between Sonja and the translator I used to be is that I had my own voice. I was writing my own books. I wasn’t trapped in another writer’s spectacular and perverse universe, but it was interesting to write about someone who was.

MR: One of the themes you explore in the novel is the idea of uprooting oneself, with all of its implications (adaptability, exposure to diversity of experiences, restlessness, distractions). Has modern life created a constant feeling of lack?

Dorthe Nors. (Photo by Agnete Schlichtkrull)

DN: It’s a very interesting existential situation to describe as a writer. I think a lot of growth, identity, and awareness, comes from destabilizing yourself geographically. A lot of creativity too. I, for instance, enjoy writing my books in different places because destabilizing myself makes me more aware of my surroundings and my own being in the world. In Mirror, Shoulder, Signal we have Sonja who left the rural areas for Copenhagen when she was in her late teens in order to study, and we have her older sister Kate, who stayed back home in the village where both girls were born. Kate’s values, her outlook on things, her geography, her sense of landscape and modernity is shaped by traditions. That leaves us with two sisters: one who uprooted herself, and one who didn’t feel she needed a better life, but stuck with the one that was outlined for her. These two women are hardly able to communicate anymore. Maybe they don’t even live in the same world anymore. Maybe some of the great divides we see in Western culture right now can be mirrored in the disconnection between these two sisters. Wouldn’t that be grand?

I think a lot of growth, identity, and awareness, comes from destabilizing yourself geographically.

MR: In the countryside there are fewer distractions, and one is often confronted with aspects of oneself that are otherwise swept under the rug. How has living in the city affected Sonja?

DN: I think living in the city has left Sonja dislocated and disconnected from other people. It’s made her lonely. All relationships require planning. Being with someone takes effort. She never just sits down with someone (’til very late in the story, that is) and she’s never able to “just be herself” in relationships. That’s also due to her “go with the flow” nature that has left her weak when it comes to finding direction. Urban life takes place on the streets, in cafes, in public, and intimacy suffers from that. I think Sonja is a woman who misses intimate relationships, which is also one of the reasons why she tries to call her sister back home all the time, but even that intimacy has been lost. Time, distance, different circumstances have left them with different languages, values, outlooks on life. The good thing about city life, however, is the perspective that it gives on the world. The diversity! The many different kinds of people! The extravaganza! The larger-than-life-ness. The ability to accept that people have different religions, traditions, sexualities, etcetera. All the things you can mirror yourself in! But the good thing about living in the landscape is meeting with that which is bigger and greater than you. It’s also a place where you’re forced to meet yourself and deal with yourself in a different way. To people whose life has been shaped by both the rural and the urban I think there’s a constant love for both places.

MR: Why do you think it’s so difficult, if not impossible, to go back to the place one came from? Despite the transformations caused by living abroad, away from one’s family, doesn’t the essential part of oneself remain?

DN: Just as you cannot step into the same river twice, you cannot return to the place you came from. The place you came from is in the past. You cannot return to the past.

Rape, Lost in Translation

MR: Belgian novelist Annelies Verbeke mentioned that most of Svensson’s fans are female readers (despite the violence towards women in his books). Why is that the case? What does that reveal about our society?

DN: Crime fiction has both male and female readers alike. What I state in the novel is that Gösta Svensson, because he has such a handsome and gentlemanlike appearance, appeals to women. The writer himself is a sex object, a powerful cliché of masculinity that some women buy into. That said, a lot of women read crime fiction and have no problem dealing with the sexual violence towards women you often find in them. I think a psychologist could write a very interesting thesis on why. My thesis in short is that we as women are so used to seeing violence against women in fiction that we don’t even notice it anymore. The appeal of crime fiction goes beyond that. It has the structure of fairytales and there’s always a closed ending in which we know who did it, why he did it and how he did it. In contrast to real life where we never know shit, that’s very calming. No loose ends!

MR: It is true that some women do not notice it anymore, while others not only see it but have started fighting to put an end to the constant depiction of violence against women in mainstream media. What lies at the core of this difference? Why have some seen it and begun to taken action, while others haven’t?

DN: I think big―and important―changes always take a leap forward and leave many behind. I think some people are comfortable and depend on the way things are, even if they’re wrong. A certain fatigue might also have gotten to some women: Why bother. It never really changes anyways. Both the codependency and the fatigue must of course be addressed. We must believe in change. Two steps forwards, one step back.

Crime fiction has the structure of fairytales and there’s always a closed ending in which we know who did it, why he did it and how he did it. In contrast to real life where we never know shit, that’s very calming. No loose ends!

MR: You mentioned that in your writing you like to explore the dark side of human nature, that you’re interested in the “shadows” that live within ourselves. How do you aim to achieve that in your writing?

DN: It’s a big question, primarily since I think all good literature is interested in that. And the process of writing should never be explained. It’s like trying to explain how a motor works and then messing the motor up in the process of explaining it. I know this much, though: I have, since I was a girl, been extremely preoccupied with watching and listening to people and I therefore find the contradiction between who people pretend to be and who they really are very interesting. I think people are lovely. I also think they’re pretty messed up, and it’s the messed up side of humanity I think writers should mirror and explore. The writer’s role in society (that is if we still have one now that reality has turned into fiction) is to observe all that escapes the light, all the things that hide in the shadow, search for the language that is pushed beneath the lines, and have a good, deep stare into the voids that hide right under the surface.

MR: You once wrote, “I do write books about middle-aged, childless women on the brink of disappearing — or you could say — on the brink of losing their license to live.” What does Sonja go through to avoid disappearing?

DN: I write books about all kinds of people, but reaching middle aged life myself of course had me focus on the changes that came with that. I don’t think Sonja does very much to stop herself from disappearing apart from finally trying to get her driver’s license and finding the courage to have a voice of her own. I hope people will read the novel to find out for themselves, and I hope it lives on levels that have nothing to do with gender (I think it does). Plenty of men have written about their midlife crisis and their works have been interpreted as “existential and describing humankind.” When a woman has a midlife crisis it should be viewed in the same way (i.e., as “existential and describing humankind”). There is a tendency to make books written by women with female protagonists into books on “womanhood.” But women are humans and describing female lives is describing humankind.

Books Where the Dog Dies, Rewritten So the Dog Doesn’t Die

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Old Yeller

It came clear to me that Mama was right. And from everything I had heard, I knew that there was very little chance of Old Yeller’s escaping the sickness. It was going to kill something inside me to do it, but I knew then I had to shoot my big yeller dog.

“Come on out back behind the barn,” I said to him, a little too harshly, the words barely squeaking past the lump in my throat.

Old Yeller book cover

Old Yeller followed me back behind the barn. And that’s when I did it. That’s when I shot my yeller dog.

I don’t know if that’s the term: I think maybe I shoulda said “gave a shot to my yeller dog” instead of “shot my yeller dog,” but it don’t matter. It was still the hardest thing I ever did, because I’m dead afraid of needles, and I never dreamed I’d have to give a rabies shot to my own dog, but it was the right thing to do. Right away, Old Yeller seemed back to his old self: jumpin’ around and lickin’ me, and lappin’ up big bowls of water. He didn’t even complain too much about the shot. His rabies was gone.

“You’ve become a man today,” Papa told me later, at dinner.

“Why?” I asked, looking up from my cornbread. Giving the rabies shot was hard, sure, but I didn’t feel much ruined or much older by it. Then I remembered: Papa had also made me help him with his taxes that day. I sat up a little straighter. Maybe I had become a man after all.

Old Yeller gave a big ol’ woof, then stole the cornbread right off my plate, and we all laughed and laughed and laughed.

Marley and Me book cover

Marley and Me

“Do you think they’ll make a movie of this, Jen?” I murmured, my hand stroking Marley’s golden fur.

“Why would they make a movie of this, John?” Jen said, rolling over on her side and pulling the blankets up over her head.

“I’m just saying, we could spin this off into like three books and a movie, minimum,” I continued. Marley’s chest rose and fell under my hand.

“Why would anyone buy a book about two people who get married and have a dog and are happy?”

“Well, the twist is, the dog is kind of a rascal,” I said. Marley smiled in his sleep. He was a very healthy dog who would live longer than me, though I didn’t know it yet.

“That’s not a good story,” Jen mumbled. “Goodnight.”

“Jennifer Aniston would star in it,” I said.

“Goodnight, John.”

Where the Red Fern Grows

Where the Red Fern Grows book cover

Old Dan and Little Ann stood at the base of the tree, bawling and barking and howling. There was a long, deep growl from the mountain lion, who scampered from branch to branch, its yellow eyes glinting in the moonlight. For a moment, I saw what might happen: the leap of the big cat, the slashing claws, my pups lying bloodied and helpless, dying tangled in a huckleberry bush.

But none of that happened. The big cat hissed, and my dogs howled. I strained my eyes to see higher in the tree, gauging our danger. The mountain lion and I locked eyes. She kept her eyes locked on mine while she slowly reached her paw across the branch, farther than I would have thought she could have reached, and while still staring directly at me, batted a full glass of water off the branch of the tree. It crashed to the ground next to me, right where a red fern was growing.

Eventually my dogs and I grew tired of waiting, and I think the cat fell asleep anyway. And before you ask, yes, I did name my book after what happened that evening, but only because it was so hilarious to me and my living dogs. Where did that cup of water even come from?

The Grapes of Wrath book cover

The Grapes of Wrath

The dog wandered, sniffing, past the truck, until he found a puddle of water and lapped at it. He raised his head and looked across the pavement. Rose of Sharon screamed. A big swift car squealed its tires and jerked his wheel, the car nearly tipping up on two tires as the vehicle narrowly missed the family pet.

“Dammit, but I won’t be a symbol for the suffocatin’ and murd’rous weight of capitalism and the myth of the American Dream on the day laborer and migrant worker by killin’ your pup with my sportscar!” the driver screamed out his window, giving the whole Joad family the finger.

And he wouldn’t. Everythin’ else — ev’ry death an’ loss an’ unjustice an’ tragedy an’ animal for the next 400 pages or so would basically drive that point home — but at least the whole time, through everything, the Joads had their beloved dog. He wasn’t very good symbolism, but he was a very good boy.

The Art of Racing in the Rain book cover

The Art of Racing in the Rain

[No book found]

The Odyssey

The dog Argos lay there, covered in ticks,
But as soon as he became aware of Odysseus,
He leapt to his feet
And put his paws upon Odysseus’ shoulders and it was
Almost as though they were hugging.

The dog’s paws wrapped around the man’s shoulders
As they shook and shook.
It was as though no time had passed
Between man and dog.

“Who is this dog?” Odysseus asked at last, smiling through tears
As though he did not know his own pup.
“Who is this good boy?
Who is this good boy?
Who is this good boy?”

The Odyssey book cover

And the swineherd, though he still did not realize
The identity of Odysseus
Was filming the whole encounter
Because he knew good content when he saw it

And later, without Odysseus’ knowledge,
He uploaded the video on YouTube
Where it was titled “Dog Greets Soldier Coming Home”
And it received well over 3 million views.

Cujo

Its snapping jaws were inches from her bare midriff, as she scrambled against the passenger seat, reaching out to try slam the Pinto’s door against the rabid dog. Cujo’s eyes met hers. Incredibly, his tail was wagging, even as he snarled, and thick strings of spittle and blood sprayed from his lips. She had a moment, then, while his tail wagged, when she could have slammed the car’s door on him: once, twice, ended it. But then she remembered what she had always said, before Cujo went and started murdering everyone in town: There are no bad dogs. Only bad owners. Or perhaps more specifically, in this case, bad rabid bats.

Cujo book cover

Did she still believe it? She still believed it. For a moment, she felt a twinge of guilt about moving the blame to a rabid bat. Could it also be true that there were no bad bats? It wasn’t talked about. Cujo roared at the door. The innate morality of dogs is well-established, but in a way, we are just beginning to have those necessary conversations around the morality of bats. She would have to —

THE BOY was screaming but THE WOMAN had suddenly become distracted and had let her hand fall from the door handle. He could tell THE WOMAN would not be smashing him to death with a door because she kept muttering “Maybe the only bully breed here is … man” but he didn’t understand what THE WOMAN meant and so out of confusion he bit her head off, and went on to bite the head off of every person in the whole town. Still, every MAN and WOMAN and CHILD agreed that they preferred to die by Cujo’s jaws than to live with the knowledge that they had killed a dog. Once all the people were gone, he suddenly felt very tired and much less murderous. He let out a big sigh and circled around three times before settling in to take a long, well-deserved nap. He was A GOOD BOY.

RFID Machines in British Libraries Are Producing Charming Found Poetry

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Stratford-upon-Avon is usually thought of as the birthplace of Shakespeare, but perhaps in the future it will be known as the birthplace of our greatest accidental machine poet: an RFID-based book scanning machine that turns returned titles into verse.

Patrons at the Stratford library and other libraries in Warwickshire, England can use the machines to easily check out and return books—just stack them in the scanner, and the machine can read their details from a chip embedded in the spine. If you like, it can print out a receipt confirming your return. Librarians also use the machines to record books that are dropped off, and last month, a Stratford staffer noticed that some of those receipts were downright lyrical.

Since then, several other Warwickshire libraries have joined in—all in the spirit of fun, says Stephanie Bellew, a reader development librarian at Warwickshire Libraries: “There is no rivalry/competition between our libraries — we’re just sharing the words and hopefully others will join in or simply gain pleasure/inspiration from our offerings.” However, perhaps due to its literary heritage, the Stratford branch is still the most prolific (and, as below, occasionally disturbing).

Machines are notoriously bad at generating or even interpreting literature—see, for instance, our reporting about an artificial intelligence trying unsuccessfully to write the first line of a novel, or this article on the difficulty of machine translation. Usually, when they write something decent—like those predictive text novels and scripts that blow up Twitter occasionally—it’s because there’s been a massive amount of human editing on the back end.

The RFID machine in the process of creating. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Bellew)

Is there human involvement in this case? Well, humans write the book titles, which is probably primarily responsible for the success of the RFID poems; they’re using a limited number of input strings, all of which are already meaningful phrases. Humans also select which books to check out, which can lend a theme to a poem. But librarians swear the scanners do the rest themselves. Bellew spoke to a Stratford library staffer who insisted that selecting titles in order to force a good poem would be “going against the essence of the art.” She herself is a little more lenient: “I definitely think that there is room for ‘manipulation’ with this art form and I’m convinced that there are some very clever library staff out there who will be producing some amazing ‘carefully crafted’ poetry as we speak,” she admits. But if they are, “we should celebrate this as a win for creativity.”

Verse by the RFID machines includes this paean to father-child relationships:

This ballad of the homesick witch:

And this lightly disturbing three-part series that we’re thinking of as “Nikola Tesla animates the Bride of Frankenstein”:

“We are really appreciative of our wonderfully creative staff and the fantastic job that they do, and it is so great to be able to showcase this to the wider world,” Bellew told us. And we are also proud of the machines. It’s nice to know that when they take over, we’ll still have poetry.

Electric Lit Is Delighted to Welcome Its Newest Board Member, Meredith Talusan

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Electric Literature is excited to welcome Meredith Talusan, the executive editor of Them, Condé Nast’s recently-launched LGTBQ website, to its board of directors.

Originally from the Philippines (where she was a child actor in a popular sitcom!), Talusan earned an MFA in creative writing and an MA in comparative literature from Cornell University. Fairest, her memoir exploring race, gender, immigration, and intersectionality, is forthcoming from Viking Press.

Before joining Them, Talusan worked as a staff writer at BuzzFeed covering LGBTQ issues, and has received a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Gay and Lesbian Association. In addition to her stellar editorial work at Them, she has spearheaded special projects like an interactive map and voting guide focused on LGBTQ issues, in partnership with Google. She brings her passion for creative digital initiatives to Electric Literature.

“I love Electric Literature’s mission and the way it bridges the worlds of traditional books and whatever the future has in store,” says Talusan. “It’s vital to keep pushing literature forward, while staying rooted in a tradition of art and scholarship.”

Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels That Take Us Beyond the Gender Binary

Talusan is the first new member of Electric Literature’s board since Nicole Cliffe, writer and co-founder of the Toast, joined in December 2017. Talusan’s activism as a transgender writer, and as an editor amplifying trans, queer, and genderqueer voices, fits right in with Electric Lit’s goal of making literature relevant, exciting, and inclusive.

“The principles of our mission should be reflected by our board,” says Electric Literature’s Executive Director, Halimah Marcus. “We want our readers to feel represented in our leadership as well as in our subject matter and bylines.”

Talusan will join Cliffe and other board members Andy Hunter, Electric Lit’s co-founder and publisher of Catapult and Lit Hub; acclaimed novelist Michael Cunningham; Bookforum publisher Danielle McConnell; the vice president and executive editor of HarperCollins, Sara Nelson; and the vice president and executive editor of Farrar Straus and Giroux, Sean McDonald.